Hot Springs
Five bathers, mostly nude, one wearing long sleeves and a black beanie, lounge among ocher and brown reeds, the murky water of the hot springs coiling through sand. A blue camp chair draped with a towel stands nearby; behind it, clothing is piled on a rock. The water holds the image of a cloudy sky, muted blue rippling through white the texture of cotton balls. In the background, sand dunes are framed by towering navy-blue mountains smeared with rusty pink. The hot springs appear isolated; there is no other water. The undulating, arid landscape extends to the edge of the frame, hinting at the desert that lies beyond.
Pah rump
In early fall, Kim String fellow, a landscape photographer, camped in the Pah rump Valley, a stretch of the Mojave Desert just over the Nevada border, near a fenced-off solar facility owned by a subsidiary of Next Era Energy Resources, a Florida-based company. The Yellow Pine Solar project was still under construction, and partially assembled solar panels gleamed in the late afternoon light. Conservationists were there to protest the way they claimed it had destroyed Mojave yucca and disturbed the habitat of the protected desert tortoise, just as previous industrial-scale renewable energy developments had. String fellow, who considers herself an environmentalist, gave a brief speech before the assembled activists and writers about energy extraction in the desert. Consumerism, she said, was fueling our need for energy. “We can cover the entire planet (in solar panels),” she said, “but it will never be enough.”
String fellow spoke of her own sprawling Mojave Project, an ever-growing art project that includes a reported essay and a photo series about industrial solar development in the desert. “The work I’m most interested in is work that is about the environment,” she told me. “It’s art as activism.” To String fellow, Yellow Pine and similar developments reinforce an anachronistic stereotype of desert as wasteland, desert as barren, a landscape from which humans could take and take until there was actually nothing left. To counter that stereotype, String fellow, who is 59, has dedicated much of the last 25 years to documenting the complexity of life — both human and nonhuman — in the Mojave and Colorado deserts.
Using photography, her primary medium, as well as audio, video, and essays written by herself and others, she examines the ways in which humans intervene in the landscapes we inhabit, from homesteading in Wonder Valley to the Manhattan Project and Cold War-era radioactive testing and manufacturing in southeast Washington. For decades, urban artists have flocked to the Mojave, often gawking at the desert’s extremities or using the landscape as a canvas rather than a subject in itself. String fellow’s aim is to resist exploitation of all kinds — including artistic — by creating a multi-decade project massive in scope, one that relies on months of research per essay and hours spent interviewing people who live in the Mojave.
The online header graphic for The Mojave Project is a map published by Time magazine in 1955, whose defined points of interest — mineral extraction sites, military installations and national monuments — reflect the “archaic values” that she seeks to repudiate, String fellow wrote in an essay for the magazine Desert Report. “Absent are references to the Mojave’s many Indigenous nations or their respected boundaries,” she wrote. “Nor are there any references to the complex biodiversity of the Mojave Desert. Over time, I hope that The Mojave Project rewrites Time’s 1955 map into an inclusive topography that celebrates the region’s underrepresented histories, voices, and richly diverse ecology.”
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